Masks fail to hide the fear

If this occurred during the processing of passengers from one Dragonair flight just in from Beijing this week, it was a barely discernible flip. In most cases, a masked passenger faced a masked official as the passport was examined.

In a bizarre counterpoint to the war raging in the Arab world, this meeting place of East Asia has been plunged into a kind of purdah. Airline cabin staff wear the same figure-hugging uniforms, but reveal only their eyes. Likewise the chic women strolling with designer-label shopping bags, the businessmen in yellow power-ties, the counter staff in hotels and banks.

But the mostly Chinese people of Hong Kong are far from being rendered more "inscrutable" to Western outsiders. What you can read in their eyes, their wary looks at strangers, is fear.

The pneumonia variant known officially as severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, is not of historical plague proportions - so far, it has stricken only 734 of Hong Kong's seven million people - but having claimed 17 lives, the odds are plain enough to a population that bets massively on horses, mahjong, cards and lotteries. ");document.write("

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Outside the enormous Amoy Gardens housing complex in a grimy part of the Kowloon peninsula, Anna Lam emerges from its B Block where she lives with her husband. "Why aren't you wearing a mask?" she scolds. "Don't you know it's very dangerous around here?" It had seemed impolite to approach a stranger wearing a face mask.

Amoy Gardens is a vast podium of shops and car parks, out of which, if you crane your neck backwards, a dozen 30-storey apartment blocks poke through the moist warm air almost to the low clouds. A week ago, the pneumonia virus began hitting residents at an alarming rate, concentrated in the E Block and in a vertical line of two matching apartments on each floor.

Until then, researchers tracking the new illness had been getting confident it was spread by close personal contact, such as between a patient and medical staff, in which droplets of mucus might be transferred. The 270 cases at Amoy Gardens suggest a potentially more serious method of transmission, through ventilation or water channels.

On Monday, Hong Kong's health authority placed E Block under a two-week quarantine order, and transferred its remaining residents into several government recreation camps in remote parts of the territory. Throughout the estate, teams of workers scrub with detergents and bleach. "We are about to go into E Block to clean the air filters," said air-conditioning worker Martin Li. "It could be quite dangerous." The health department is also taking samples from an adjacent construction site, where workers had been urinating from upper floors, to check whether infected droplets might have been blown across to block E.

Almost all of the dozens of small businesses in the estate's podium - clothing shops, optometrists, cafes - have closed for the duration of the quarantine. At the Brotherly Digital Color Print shop, owner Raymond Wong was finishing off some jobs and preparing to shut too. "Income zero," he said.

The Kam family keep their pharmacy open - selling a lot of face masks, latex gloves and sterilising solutions - but their resident Chinese traditional medicine practitioner has taken off. "Couldn't you wear that face mask more appropriately?" Mrs Kam adds anxiously, showing how one string should be looped above the ears.

It is at Hong Kong's new $15billion airport - the glittering centrepiece of Hong Kong's effort to reassert itself into the 50-year period of indirect Chinese rule that began after the 1997 departure of the British governor - that the epidemic most clearly shows its economic effects.

On Tuesday, a 14-year-old schoolboy created panic by downloading a page from the website of the Ming Pao newspaper, and filling it with a spurious story that Hong Kong was about to be declared an "infected city" with all businesses ordered to shut down. For good measure, he added that the territory's Beijing-appointed chief executive, former shipping magnate Tung Chee-hwa, had quit.

When put around the internet, this had Hong Kong people struggling to stock up on rice and other supplies, stripping supermarket shelves bare, before authorities put out convincing denials and the hoaxer was arrested.

But on Wednesday, the story became partly true. For the first time in memory, the World Health Organisation advised travellers to avoid Hong Kong and the adjacent Chinese province of Guangdong, where the pneumonia virus is thought to have originated and the largest number of cases has occurred.

"Most of the diseases have a vaccine or a drug," said WHO's infectious diseases chief David Heymann in Geneva. "This is the first time we've recommended that people avoid a certain area because there's no vaccine and no drug."

On Thursday, the airport's vast passenger terminal, designed by architect Norman Foster and said to be the biggest enclosed structure on the planet, was noticeably quiet, passengers outnumbered by strolling police and airline staff. Out of the normal 550 or so daily flights, 94 had been cancelled. With schools shut down as a quarantine precaution until a two-week holiday at Easter, many expatriate families are leaving, after a show of bravado at last weekend's rugby seven-a-side tournament, when fans spurned masks.

Economists in Hong Kong investment banks such as Morgan Stanley and BNP Paribas Peregrine now think the SARS epidemic will have a worse effect on East Asia's economic growth this year than the Iraq war, with several lowering their forecasts this week. Morgan Stanley's Andy Xie sees a 60 per cent decline in tourism for three months, assuming that the epidemic falls away in May, as some experts predict. This means at least one third of a percentage point lost from the region's overall growth for this year. But it could get much worse, especially if China has been hiding bad news.

"The above assumptions are relatively optimistic, in our view," Mr Xie warned. "We want to re-emphasise that we believe this medical crisis is the gravest since the 1998 Asian (economic) crisis. Its ramifications are still difficult to grasp at this point. It is a developing story."